It has taken me a while to find a short and simple enough example of a will to use for this basic introduction to probate records. The will of John Dickson of Cambridge, yeoman, illustrated here, meets the short qualification although..

The names my parents ended up giving their children – Christopher, Carolyn, and Katherine – are names that most people would probably consider not that unusual. But there were several other names my father had in mind. For a boy, he liked the..

On 6 November 1869, in New Brunswick, New Jersey, the Rutgers Queensmen[1] defeated the College of New Jersey[2] Tigers by a score of 6 to 4 in what is regarded as the first college football game ever played.[3] College..

From tracing free people of color in New England to identifying former slaves in the deep south, NEHGS can help you tell your family story. We have a number of guides and tools in our library and available through our..

If you descend from French-Canadians, or your ancestors spent some time in Québec, notarial records will be an important source to examine in your..

One of the resources every family historian hopes to find and treasure is a family Bible full of handwritten notations of births, marriages, and deaths. These Bibles are often beautiful in themselves for their illuminated pages, or for the well-worn leather covers..

[Editor's note: This post originally appeared in Vita Brevis on 25 April 2014. Today, AJHS-NEA is known as the Jewish Heritage Center at NEHGS.]

As the American Jewish Historical Society, New England Archives (AJHS–NEA) has only recently formed a strategic partnership..

[Editor's note: This post originally appeared in Vita Brevis on 20 February 2014.]

I frequently encounter eighteenth- or nineteenth-century dates, especially on the migration trail, that are not cited and which often derive from “online trees,” usually the FamilySearch..

[Editor’s note: Henry B. Hoff, C.G., F.A.S.G., is editor of The New England Historical and Genealogical Register. Excerpts from some of his Vita Brevis posts can be read below.]

From Just how reliable is that source?: Many of us have been betrayed, genealogically..

“It was 5:14 o'clock in the morning of Wednesday, April 18 [1906]. Nearly half a million people on the western edge of the American continent awoke suddenly with a roaring in their ears..